ROB WOUTAT | The totalitarian oppression of ... noise

"In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men."

- Luigi Rossolo, a 20th century Italian painter/composer

Having just spent several days in Manhattan, where trucks grind, buses rumble, sirens scream, cars zoom and honk, and pedestrians have to almost yell to hear each other above the din. Like the Irish writer/politician Richard Steele, I often wished I could close my ears as easily as I close my eyes.

So it was a form of deliverance to return to the West Sound where some of my houseguests have complained that they couldn't sleep because it's too quiet.

To those of a certain age, it's baffling that some people actually like noise — young people who frequent loud bars, attend rock concerts, carry boom boxes on their shoulders, install super amps in their cars, and modify their mufflers to ensure maximum roar on acceleration.

And there are the fans at Seahawks games and Sonics games where the continuous noise from fans, announcers and bands makes normal conversation impossible.

To those fans, the noise is stimulating and infectious, as it is to the athletes they watch. Athletes draw energy from the noise that bombards them, just as actors and musicians do from applause. At large track meets, high-jumpers, long-jumpers and pole-vaulters even solicit fan noise before they charge down the runway.

In baseball, where noise is merely occasional, players are fueled by it and maybe become accustomed to it. Babe Ruth, who spent most of his life in baseball stadiums and may even have become addicted to noise — even needed it on a golf course. "How about a little noise," he said as he addressed his ball. "How do you expect a man to putt?"

Politicians like noise, too, including the noise of their own pronouncements, but especially the noise of their adulatory followers. When English businessman/essayist Walter Bagehot noted that an inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind, he might have specified politicians.

The noise that accompanied the Industrial Age in the 19th century brought what now is common in every community — the noise ordinance. Some are effective; some aren't.

Consider the case of the Snohomish County woman who was raising chickens in her yard illegally until a neighbor reported her to the authorities for violating the neighborhood covenant. To retaliate, the chicken-grower parked her car in front of the neighbor's house in the early morning and leaned on the horn for five to 10 minutes.

She was charged and spent a night in jail for violating the local noise ordinance, which forbids the use of the horn for purposes other than public safety, or as part of an official parade or public event.

She argued, believe it or not, that her rights to free speech had been violated. Her case finally went to the state Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 in her favor. The Snohomish noise ordinance was overly vague, the court said. Besides — believe it or not again — it said that horn-honking is speech, and even if it annoys not just the intended target but the whole neighborhood, it's therefore protected by the Constitution.

Kitsap's Title 10 (Peace, Safety and Morals), Chapter 10.28 (Noise) goes all out, devoting 2,866 words in an attempt to clarify a reasonable noise policy. It might seem adequate to you and me. But if horn-honking is protected speech, even when used as the Snohomish woman used it, Kitsap horn-honkers are apparently free to blast away in expression of whatever they claim to be expressing.

Could we not then take up the Arab custom of firing our automatic weapons into the air to celebrate births, birthdays, weddings, and the arrival of a good report card? Wouldn't that also be protected speech?

"Soon silence will have passed into legend," wrote Alsatian artist Jean Arp, maybe a little too pessimistically. "Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."